Unsolicited Advice

M. Wu, a recent PhD graduate from the Neuromechnics lab, has compiled this slide deck summarizing their philosophy on writing scientific papers, which is heavily influenced by Lena Ting and their discussions with colleagues in the Neuromechanics Lab. This is beyond valuable and useful to jumpstart your own philosophy of writing!

Here is a presentation I gave to our Integrating Engineering, Technology, and Rehabilitation course The presentation is based on what I like to refer to as the Islands of the Known and the Sea of the Unknown that I use to conceptualize any research project. I even got an artist to develop a template for

This is a mild rant + framework for writing an NSF GRFP application. This is based on common issues that I’ve seen in GRFP applications. I’ve seen great presentations on how to write a good GRFP application, but keep seeing a common set of issues from students who attend those great presentations. This post provides

Many people want to write a history of their field, or lots of statistics about a disease in the Significance. These points are only helpful to the reviewer in the context of the work that you propose to do. So, as stand-alone facts they may be true, but how do they help convince the reviewer

I have been wanting to write this for about five years and finally have my first attempt. I think about the aims and solving a puzzle, an important one for crystallizing and structuring my entire grant. I start my sketching, drawing, writing single sentences that capture my ideas, and not necessarily writing. The Aims page

Here is a very old document that I wrote up early in my career about how to create a lab meeting where everyone participates. It came out of my experiences participating in a variety of lab meeting styles. I wanted a safe and productive space for my graduate students and undergrads alike. Over the years,

Once upon a time there was a healthy scientific community on Twitter where we discussed science ideas and promoted our research. But alas, this community has broken apart since Twitter became X. Here are a series of tweets I made in response to a poll by Josh Cashaback about whether we make distinctions between hypotheses

I know that there is a very long and boring set of instructions for writing NIH grants, called the SF424: https://grants.nih.gov/grants/how-to-apply-application-guide.html This page is particularly helpful in listing what the review criteria are, and some tips about writing the proposal. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/how-to-apply-application-guide/format-and-write/write-your-application.htm For example, under Writing Tip #3: What points should you address? I can’t find

A big learning curve for graduate students is reading the literature. I’ve seen student spend hours and days reading every single word of a scientific paper. And this is a good exercise for class, to learn all the parts and see all the things that you don’t know. But when you’re preparing your own research,